Real-time Skin Deformation with Bones Blending

Skeletal animation with vertex blending is a popular method to model believable 3D characters. Its main advantage is its speed that allows real-time deformation even on low-level hardware. However it has some drawbacks as well: for some movements it produces non-natural postures like twisting elbows. We present a new method called bones blending that can be used as an alternative to vertex blending. Bones blending has a power to overcome the artifacts of vertex blending.

Ladislav Kavan, Jiří Žára. Real-time Skin Deformation with Bones Blending. Winter School on Computer Graphics, 2003.  

The 1st author was supported by the Czech Ministry of Education under project MSM 212300014, the 2nd author was supported by the European Union under project IST-2001-32184 and by the Czech Ministry of Education under project LN00B096. We would also like to thank to the CharacterFX development team for providing a character model and animation software.